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Monday, February 22
A TISSOT FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 22 Feb 2010 12:30 AM PST
Completed between 1883 and 1885, this painting is known as The Sporting Ladies and also as The Circus Lover from a series called Women Of Paris.
As with several images of the circus by Tissot, and many other works as well, the painter has created a number of distinct spaces that draw us into the scene progressively -- the space occupied by the gentleman leaning in towards the ladies, with the unseen part of his figure seeming to occupy our, the viewers' space, into which the central female is peering, the space of the seated ladies, the space of the circus ring, and the space of the background seats.
The space of the circus ring is further articulated into the aerial space of the trapeze artists and the space of the clown in the sawdust and there is, as a kind of punctuation, a glimpse in the distant background of a lighted foyer opening on to the highest rung of seats.
The elegant calculation of the composition makes for a very dynamic and seductive image.
Tuesday, November 10
A BÉRAUD FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 10 Nov 2009 08:24 AM PST
Jean Béraud left us the most charming records of the boulevards and cafés of Paris during the Belle Époque. The Impressionists often treated the same subjects, but their emphasis on the surfaces of their canvases, on effects of light and color, took precedence over documentary concerns. Béraud wanted us to know how it felt to physically inhabit the places he painted. Like all academic painters, he concentrated on the drama of space, as a way of drawing us imaginatively into his images.
The painting above depicts La Pâtisserie Gloppe on the Champs Élysées in 1889. Béraud evokes the magical use of mirrors in the shop's interior, the behavior of its patrons, the bourgeois ordinariness of the scene. It is rooted in the here and now, which has become the there and then, and so oddly poignant, in a way the Impressionists rarely are. Béraud recedes into his work, creating a space for us to enter this bygone moment of a bygone age.
The image has something of the authority of a photograph and something of the intense subjectivity of the artist's desire to record just what he saw, just what he thought we might have seen if we had been with him that day in the shop, and no more.
He has created a profoundly democratic work of art, radically out of step with the neo-Romantic egocentricity of the 20th-Century modernist.
Monday, November 9
REPULSIVE BUT RIGHT, ROMANTIC BUT WRONG: AN AESTHETIC DELUSION
by
Lloydville
on Mon 09 Nov 2009 07:55 AM PST
Hundreds of years from now, when historians look back at the intellectual life of the 20th Century, I think they will be struck by two extraordinary, almost inconceivable delusions, one aesthetic and one political.
In this post I'll discuss the aesthetic delusion, which involved the violent reaction against the art of the Victorian age. The disillusionment with the European political structure brought on by the madness of WWI created a sense among intellectuals that all aspects of the 19th century world had been invalidated at a stroke. Modernism in the arts arose as a response to this, attended by great glamor and energy. It was primarily reactionary -- the new forms it embraced rarely had value in themselves . . . their juice derived from the simple fact that they were not Victorian, were anti-Victorian.
Most of what had made art valuable as a cultural force -- as an example of virtuosity, of discipline, of social community, of faith -- was simply jettisoned. In their place was substituted "attitude", the attitude of rebellion. The fine arts of the 20th Century instantly became irrelevant to the popular mind, finding a home in the esteem of an increasingly hermetic elite, dependent on institutional support for their survival.
The irony of this was little appreciated. The academic art of the 19th Century, against which the modernists rebelled, had depended on official endorsement, but also on the approval of a wide and diverse public. The "anti-academic" art of the new, permanent "avant-garde" had no life at all apart from the patronage of museums, institutes of "higher learning" and a gallery establishment catering to the very wealthy.
The old functions of art continued to be performed in areas outside the control of these elites, in the arts of film and popular music, for example -- which is why film and popular music became the most exciting and dynamic art forms of the 20th century, even as what were formerly seen as "the fine arts" went on enacting their increasingly tiresome rituals of negation, carried to absurd extremes. Painting, we would eventually be told, was about nothing but paint.
The establishment which once endorsed Victorian academic art, and by extension all traditional art, had become repulsive in the 20th Century. Those who sought to replace this art with "modern forms" became romantic. These labels acted as blinders, almost as blindfolds, until it became impossible to see that the reactionary gestures of the modernists had little content beyond the gestural, while those who toiled away in discredited or unsanctioned forms (like Mr. Armstrong, above) were creating the truly great, valuable and enduring art of their time.
In an upcoming post I'll have a look at the seminal political delusion of the 20th Century.
Friday, July 31
A TISSOT FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Fri 31 Jul 2009 01:19 AM PDT
Paul Zahl (of The Zahl File fame) recently sent me a postcard of the Tissot painting above, called "The Ball On Shipboard". It was done around 1874 and is now in the collection of The Tate Gallery in London.
It was, I believe, the first Tissot I ever saw, reproduced in a book. It was certainly the first Tissot that took my breath away, with its intricate progression of spaces leading the eye deeper and deeper into the image, starting with the figure of the young lady seated in the foreground and seeming to look into the viewer's space, on this side of the picture frame. Then groups of figures lead us back over the main deck and down to the dancing on the deck below and finally to the wide view of the harbor over the ship's rail.
We are left with a sense that we have moved through these spaces physically -- that we have attended this ball rather than just seen a picture of it.
Friday, July 3
LA VIÈRGE AUX ANGES
by
Lloydville
on Fri 03 Jul 2009 01:29 AM PDT
This painting by Bouguereau, from 1881, is owned by the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, just over the hill from Hollywood. In 2005 it went up to the Getty Museum in Santa Monica on an extended loan in return for restoration, which primarily involved removing a coat of varnish that had yellowed, muting the original colors. The scan above records the restored work and comes by way of the always amazing Art Renewal Center.
I'm not sure whether or not the painting has gone back to Forest Lawn, but if you live in the Los Angeles area you're within striking distance of it, either way. If I lived in the Los Angeles area, I go see it immediately.
It's said that you either worship Bouguereau or you despise him -- folks on either end of the spectrum tend to be a bit dogmatic on the subject. Anti-Modernists are inclined to place him in the Pantheon of the old masters, which seems extreme. I think Bouguereau is a great painter of the second or third rank, assuming, for example, that Jan Van Eyck is a painter of the first rank. Anti-Victorians are inclined to dismiss him out of hand as the embodiment of kitsch, which I think is even sillier.
The important thing is that his works are wonderful, in a very odd and original way. You can enjoy them immensely without worshiping them and you can recognize their limitations without despising them.
Thursday, June 11
A THOMAS EAKINS FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 11 Jun 2009 06:40 AM PDT
"Taking the Count", from 1896 -- one of several very cool Eakins works depicting "the ring".
Eakins had a decidedly non-Romantic attitude towards his subjects, which attracted a lot of criticism from the art establishment of his day. As a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy Of the Fine Arts he preferred to have his students draw from nude models rather than from plaster casts and was ultimately fired for removing the loincloth from a male model while female students were present. This contrarian strain has given him a bona fides with modern critics -- he's one of the few Victorian academic painters it is fashionable to admire.
Whatever.
Monday, March 30
JULIUS LEBLANC STEWART: A VICTORIAN PAINTER YOU SHOULD KNOW
by
Lloydville
on Mon 30 Mar 2009 01:43 PM PDT
Julius LeBlanc Stewart, whose work I discovered via Femme Femme Femme, was an American artist who studied and worked mostly in Europe. He was a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Raimundo de Madrazo. He absorbed Gérôme's technical skills, to a degree, but generally followed de Madrazo in his choice of subjects, contemporary interiors and portraits, mostly of women, that usually featured a sensual treatment of fabrics. These portraits remind one strongly of John Singer Sargent's and are often very fine:
Stewart, like Sargent, was a late Victorian -- he lived until 1919 -- and like Sargent was attracted to the free brush-strokes of the Impressionists, always allied, however, with a rigorous academic draftsmanship and a concern for the evocation of space for dramatic effects.
Like many Victorian academic painters, Stewart sketched very freely, with an eye to the surface effects of paint on canvas, preserved in a limited way in the more finished work he exhibited. Degas struck a different balance between sketch and "finish", but the dynamic was exactly the same. Below is a Stewart sketch:
He did a series of nudes in outdoor settings that evoked mythological subjects, but only nominally. They have the frankness and the contemporary feel of Anders Zorn's very similar scenes:
Like Tissot, Stewart loved the spatial dramatics of figures on ships, as with the painting at the head of this post.
The late Victorians influenced by Impressionism but still not seduced away from academic formalism constitute a fascinating group, though Sargent is the only one of them who has any kind of reputation today, alas.
Wednesday, March 18
FEMME FEMME FEMME
by
Lloydville
on Wed 18 Mar 2009 12:56 AM PDT
One of the loveliest sites online is Femme Femme Femme -- it's one I visit almost every day and which has been listed among my favorite links (to the right there) for a long time. It's a mostly visual blog that celebrates the female form in art with exceptional good taste.
On Monday, when visiting the site, I had to pass through a "Content Warning" message put up by Google, which hosts the site. Someone apparently complained that the site contained "objectionable" material. The image above (by Julius LeBlanc Stewart, from 1900) is about as "objectionable" as the site ever gets, if you think that paintings of naked women are objectionable, and if you do you should probably be in therapy.
Google in China has been a lapdog for that nation's totalitarian censors, and while it hasn't censored Femme Femme Femme it has kowtowed to the totalitarian sensibility by forcing the site's viewers to read and acknowledge what I can only describe as an unhealthy "opinion" about images of women in art.
That's objectionable.
I urge everyone to visit the site and send messages of support to its author -- and if anyone knows how to complain to Google about its shameful behavior, please pass the information along.
Friday, August 15
A QUOTE FOR TODAY FROM PHILIPPE SOLLERS
by
Lloydville
on Fri 15 Aug 2008 01:26 PM PDT
Une femme qui tolère votre sommeil fait plus que vous aimer, elle vous pardonne d'exister.
(A woman who tolerates your sleeping does more than love you -- she pardons you for existing.)
-- Philippe Sollers
[With thanks to Femme Femme Femme for the quote -- image by Cabanel, a Victorian painter famous for his historical and mythological works, which tended to be florid and a bit silly, but whose portraits could be very fine, indeed.]
Thursday, July 24
GIRLS, THE MOON, THE SEA
by
Lloydville
on Thu 24 Jul 2008 11:52 PM PDT
Tristan, on his blog the emotional blackmailers handbook, recently posted the above painting by Winslow Homer, Summer Night, which I was happy to be reminded of. There's something mysterious and wonderful about the image -- two girls dancing together, by the sea, in the light of the moon. It's not quite erotic, but there are tidal forces at work here which might easily lure a lost mariner to his doom, if he didn't have all his wits about him, crossing the bar.
Check out Tristan's site, which usually contains photographs of lovely, gracious things in and around London. It's like a visit to a fine old pub, where you can knock back a pint of Guinness in a corner by yourself and mull over visions like the one above . . . at a safe distance. In that corner, starting on your second pint, you might call to mind, if you've been wise enough to memorize it, this poem by Tennyson:
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
Wednesday, April 30
JULIO ROMERO DE TORRES
by
Lloydville
on Wed 30 Apr 2008 02:58 AM PDT
This wonderful portrait, Carmen Of Cordova,
is by Julio Romero de Torres, a Spanish painter of the late Victorian
and early modern eras. His images are dark, earthy and
erotic, with a hint of the perverse.
He started out doing conventional Victorian narrative tableaux, like the one above -- titled Look How Beautiful She Was! -- but eventually developed a more eccentric vision. Below, a twist on a famous paiting by Velasquez:
Like any respectable Spaniard he both loved and feared women . . .
. . . and also tended to see them in a mystical light:
His sensibility represents an odd blend of the carnal and the spiritual
-- always in his work, however sensual, we can hear the Spanish saying
"Where the body goes, there goes death."
Above, the artist in his studio with a model and a visitor.
Romero de Torres was born and spent most of his life in Córdoba, taking
time out to serve as a pilot in WWI and to visit the Argentine, where
he got sick, returning to Córdoba to die at the age of 55. There
are no books in English which collect his work, although twelve more
books about the mildly amusing advertising artist Andy Warhol were
published last week.
Something is terribly wrong with our civilization -- but you knew that.
There is a museum in Córdoba which lovingly preserves his house and work, which you can visit virtually here.
Thanks, as so often, to Little Hokum Rag and Femme Femme Femme for pointing the way to this enchanting painter.
Tuesday, April 8
A BOUGUEREAU FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 08 Apr 2008 08:00 AM PDT
Once a poster boy for bourgeois bad taste, Bouguereau is starting to
look more and more radical -- certainly more and more bizarre.
The solidity of his angels here is uncanny. The wings of angels
in art are often merely symbolic -- in this image they
seem like practical appendages, as necessary to flight as a bird's
wings. They give these angels a monstrous quality, as though
they're the product of some unholy genetic experiment. On the
other hand, it may be that the sight of real angels would produce the
same impression and that real angels, if photographed, would look exactly as
they do above.
For a lengthier meditation on the work of this extraordinary artist, go here:
Bouguereau and the Über-Photograph
Wednesday, April 2
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE: A VICTORIAN ARTIST YOU SHOULD KNOW
by
Lloydville
on Wed 02 Apr 2008 02:48 AM PDT
Jules Bastien-Lepage died tragically young, in 1884, when he was in his late thirties. He painted one masterpiece, Joan Listening To the Voices (above),
which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
It's impossible to describe the effect of this large canvas, with its
complex and convincing illusion of space, which Joan seems about to step out of,
prompted forward by her visions. It's an example of a
photo-realistic technique enlisted in the service of mystical drama.
Bastien-Lepage groped about a bit in his short career, with stylized
works of grandiose ambition that seem clumsy and pretentious and
modest genre paintings that seem trite, but his über-photographic style
could occasionally produce miracles, like this extraordinary portrait of Sarah Bernhardt,
which has the quality of a bas-relief:
No other evocation of Bernhardt, in literature, art or photography,
brings us as close as Bastien-Lepage's portrait does to the charisma of
the great artist. Nadar's photographs of the young actress
humanize her, touch the heart -- Bastien-Lepage's portrait records the
determined audacity of her genius. She seems powerful and
vulnerable at the same time, part of the alchemy of a star.
The American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens did a remarkable
bas-relief portrait of Bastien-Lepage in bronze, which makes a fine
pendant to Bastien-Lepage's portrait of Bernhardt -- both have a
tactile grace that takes the breath away, both summon their subjects into
our immediate presence, obliterating time and mortality:
Thursday, February 21
PIERROT'S EMBRACE
by
Lloydville
on Thu 21 Feb 2008 08:23 PM PST
Guillaume Seignac
was a late Victorian painter (he died in 1924) who mostly turned out
undistinguished but sometimes amusing imitations of Bouguereau.
His draftsmanship could be flabby and his images didn't have the
über-photographic authority of his master.
The image above is different, though. It has an odd suggestive
power, almost perverse, that's rooted in theatrical gesture. I
find it haunting, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on.
Wednesday, December 5
A GÉRÔME FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 05 Dec 2007 07:31 AM PST
Victorian academic painters loved doing scenes set in antique Roman or
Oriental baths -- it was a respectable way of showing lots of women in
various stages of undress. The casual, languorous poses of these
women would have seemed shocking in a modern setting or unseemly in
mythological or allegorical images. One of the things that was
radical about the Impressionists was their depiction of nudity in
naturalistic ways, in ordinary settings. The academics had it both
ways -- their settings could say, by implication, "Modern European
women don't look or act this way with their clothes off," but everyone
knew (or suspected, or hoped) differently. The hypocrisy added a little spice to the
proceedings -- wink, wink . . . nudge, nudge. It seems a bit
silly now, but a bit charming, too.
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